Introduction. 35) 
the posy of the gallant of the seventeenth 
century,— 
‘* Love him who gave thee this ring of gold, 
Tis he must kiss thee when thou art old.” 
But smile as you will, my cynical reader, 
life is but a poor farce, and drearily played 
too, when the emotional part of human 
nature is expunged therefrom. By all means. 
let us have positive philosophy and abstract 
science, but I exhort you let us leaven these. 
with the fancies of dreamland, and pleasures 
of sentiment and love; or, Is Life worth 
living, after all? 
But I approach the end: at the moment 
when the Philosopher’s Stone might have 
been discovered, Cupid burst through my 
lattice, and, with a smile more of heaven. 
than of earth, fixed his eyes on me, and seemed 
to beckon me to his abode. The shade of 
Paracelsus, too, had urged me to desist from 
my studies with the crucible. Thus it is, 
